Poems & Poets I love (and you might love too)
Hello lover of beauty
I imagine that, like me, you appreciate what is beautiful in your life. You might have particular views from your home that you enjoy, or appreciate the way the light falls just so in the morning… maybe you have particular artists whose work brings you pleasure, favourite trees and flowers and seasons, a favourite mug that feels just right in the hand.
I feel this way about poetry too. There are poets I deeply admire for their entire body of work, and there are poems that I find simply exquisite. They make me pause, they settle me, they create images that stay with me long after I’ve stopped reading.
I’m delighted to share with you some poetry and poets I love. Like all art, what we love is subjective, and also changes over time. So consider this a shelf of things that I find beautiful, which you are welcome to pick up, turn over, and consider. You might like to take one or two of these poems with you and simply put the others back on the shelf.
a quick word before you read…
As I wrote last week, to take a poem in you need to slow right down. That is the true gift of poetry! It is not just the poem, but slowing down enough to take your own self into your arms again. When a poem touches us, that’s what’s happening. The heart of the poem and the heart of our own self meet.
I’d love to gently remind you (or offer you this idea for the first time, perhaps), that if you read a poem and it doesn’t make sense or you don’t feel anything in response, it has nothing to do with you. It is also nothing to do with the poem. It’s simply chemistry. We love what we love, and we don’t love what we don’t love. Simple as that.
Enjoy, M xx
1.
WILD GEESE
by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Listen to Mary Oliver read Wild Geese here.
2.
SWEET DARKNESS
by David Whyte
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
3.
WHAT TO REMEMBER ON WAKING
by David Whyte
In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human
is to become visible,
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
From River Flow: New and Selected Poems by David Whyte
Visit David Whyte
4.
“HOPE” IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS
By Emily Dickinson
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Read more Emily Dickinson at The Poetry Foundation
5.
I GO BY A FIELD
by Wendell Berry
I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.
And I think of all the effort
I have wasted and all the time,
and of how much joy I took
in that failed work and how much
it taught me. For in so failing
I learned something of my place,
something of myself, and now
I welcome back the trees.
Read more about Wendell Berry
6.
AUTUMN
by Rainer Marie Rilke (1875-1926)
The leaves fall, fall as from far,
Like distant gardens withered in the heavens;
They fall with slow and lingering descent.
And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls
From out the stars into the Solitude.
Thus all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall
And lo! the other one:—it is the law.
But there is One who holds this falling
Infinitely softly in His hands.
From Poems (Tobias A. Wright, 1918), translated by Jessie Lamont
Read more Rilke
7.
december 21
by Ted Kooser
Clear and five degrees
Perfectly still this solstice morning,
in bone-cracking cold. Nothing moving,
or so one might think, but as I walk the road,
the wind held in the heart of every tree
flows to the end of each twig and forms a bud.
From Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison, by Ted Kooser
8.
GOOD BONES
By Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
From Good Bones by Maggie Smith
9.
today
by Billy Collins
If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
From Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
10.
The great wagon
an excerpt of, by Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī (1207-1273)
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
11.
FLUENT
by John O’Donohue
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
From Conamara Blues by John O’Donohue
Was there a poem here that you connected with? Would you like to let me know in the comment box below?
When I hear back about what you enjoyed, I’d love to create another list along the lines of:
“If you enjoyed ‘Wild Geese’, you might also enjoy…”
IF YOU WANT TO READ MORE RIGHT NOW…
10 Poems to Make You Feel Stronger and 5 Poems to Take Walking
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